


I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

by mysticmajestic



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Gladiator Slave Shiro, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, Langst, M/M, Singing, Slavery, Slow Burn, fighting pits, shangst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 05:31:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14277960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticmajestic/pseuds/mysticmajestic
Summary: Life is surprisingly monotonous when you're just trying to survive day to day. Shiro's given up hope for an escape. He's going to fight until he dies and nothing will change. He'll be yet another innocent victim of the Galra Empire's tyrannical reign.Until Lance Martinez is shoved into the empty cell next to his, a spark in the darkness to give Shiro hope again. Together, they'll make it out. Theyhaveto. The only other option they have is death.But a life as a prisoner, as a gladiator slave, is not so easy to escape. And the more Shiro fights, the more unwanted attention he brings to himself, casting their chances of escape into peril.





	I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

**Author's Note:**

> I hope no one minds me using the title of Maya Angelou's book "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" but I felt that it had a resonance with this story, as Shiro and Lance are both in captivity and using their songs to basically stay calm and sane. They are caged birds. 
> 
> Also! I'm going to be using quite a bit of Spanish and Japanese in this story, so if you notice any mistakes please point them out! I've done the research myself, edited the fic myself, so some things might just slip through.
> 
>  **Edit:** I am a dumbass that forgot to put in a summary before I posted the fic. So now there's a summary!

It’s hard to get a good night sleep in a prison, or what constitutes as night on an alien prison ship, is full of wailing, screaming, crying, pleading prisoners who beseech the sentries to release them, all to no avail. Or those who cry out for loved ones they may never see again.

Once they accept the futility of escape or survival, they do eventually pipe down. Everything goes back to quiet murmurings, maybe even sobbing from prisoners who’ve thought about their current situation and fallen back down the slippery slope of despair.

Until they bring a new prisoner in. A new prisoner means days or weeks or months of listening to their tortured, terrified noises. If they’re really unlucky one of the Galra will take an interest in them, ‘breaking them in’ for however long it takes them to lose interest and choose their next victim.

The prisoner in the cell next to Shiro’s died from a disease he’d come to learn was sexually transmitted. They’d screamed in agony the entire time they were awake, whimpered and sobbed when they were asleep. According to the other prisoner opposite Shiro, it’s like a parasitic worm that devours you slowly from the inside out.

The parasitic worm has no real effect on the Galra besides some irritation that can be cleared up via modern medicine, but for other species, it’s a death sentence as their biology naturally rejects the only medicine available. It's not a universal cure.

According to a boastful guard, it ate the prisoner from anus to stomach before he succumbed to the pain and died. The guard had knowingly caught it to pass it on to several prisoners before he went to the med-bay and received treatment. He’d been attracted to the loud prisoners.

As if Shiro had needed another reason to remain as quiet as possible.

But today they’re bringing in a prisoner to fill the empty cell. Whether or not they’ve decontaminated it is another story altogether.

“No! Please, no!” someone screams. “Please don’t do this!”

“Ah,” says the prisoner next to Shiro. “Fresh meat. Poor guy.”

There’s a strip of glass across the cell doors that allows him to peer out into the rest of the prison bay. Shiro approaches it to see if he can get a peek at the new prisoner. Across the domed room, as far as Shiro can see, others are doing the same. With nothing much to do except sleep, eat (whenever the guards deign to give them food), train in the narrow space, and wait in petrified horror to be called out to the gladiator pits, watching new prisoners being brought in is the best they can get in the way of entertainment.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, please! Please! Why are you doing this?”

 _They don’t care,_ Shiro thinks bitterly _._ _They don’t care what you have or haven’t done. It makes no difference to the Galra._

He feels sorry for the new guy; he knows exactly how it feels to be torn away from everything he knows, all his dreams and aspirations, to find himself in a terrifying situation that provides no window of opportunity for escape.

The guards drag a flailing man past his cell door. The man has tanned skin and brown hair. Shiro reckons they’d nearly be the same height, too. He’s dressed haphazardly in the prisoner garb, and it makes Shiro wonder if the man put up so much of a fight that the guards had had to dress him instead. The thought brings a sad smile to Shiro’s lips; that spirit will be broken by this place soon enough.

Shiro wonders what kind of species the man is. He can’t be human, even if he does look quite similar, since Shiro and the Holts were the first people to get as far out as Pluto’s moon, Kerberos. Surely time hadn’t passed so quickly that they’d dispatch another team out. It took Shiro and his team roughly five months to get to Kerberos. Time is a little hard to tell when there’s nothing resembling a clock or a daily cycle, but surely it can’t have been long?

As he frets, the crying man is thrown into the prison cell, the door swiftly shut with an echoing slam. Across the prison, other inmates turn away and go back to whatever had been entertaining them before. The guards say something to each other and laugh, then walk by Shiro’s cell without a care in the world. He hates them. God, he hates them, hates them, _hates them_! He slams his fist against the door, then turns away and flops down on the hard metal surface that constitutes his bed. There’s nothing more to see.

But he hears the man sob for hours, loud enough that it’s like he’s sharing the cell with Shiro.

 

* * *

 

To his credit, the new inmate doesn’t cause a fuss. In fact, the only way Shiro can tell he’s still alive is because sometimes he breaks out into random crying jags. Unlike other inmates, who’ve screamed and injured themselves—or the guards when they’ve been pulled out of the cell for their time in the arena (and most of them never came back)—the new inmate is as quiet as a mouse.

On what Shiro assumes to be the fourth night of the new inmate’s imprisonment, however, he begins to sing.

“ _Arrorró mi niño,_  
arrorró mi sol,  
arrorró pedazo,  
de mi corazón.  
  
Este niño lindo  
ya quiere dormir;  
háganle la cuna  
de rosa y jazmín.  
  
Háganle la cama  
en el toronjil,  
y en la cabecera  
pónganle un jazmín  
que con su fragancia  
me lo haga dormir.  
  
Arrorró mi niño,  
arrorró mi sol,  
arrorró pedazo,  
de mi corazón.  
  
Esta leche linda  
que le traigo aquí,  
es para este niño  
que se va a dormir.  
  
Arrorró mi niño,  
arrorró mi sol,  
arrorró pedazo,  
de mi corazón.  
  
Este lindo niño  
se quiere dormir...  
cierra los ojitos  
y los vuelve a abrir.  
  
Arrorró mi niño,  
arrorró mi sol,  
duérmase pedazo,  
de mi corazón.”

Shiro doesn’t realise he’s closed his eyes until the song stops, jarring him out of his trance. The new inmate has a soft yet deep voice, sweet enough to allow Shiro to forget the world and its sorrows, almost lulling him to sleep. Shiro wants to ask the new inmate to sing it again. _Bring that peace back, please_. But he doesn’t know to ask, and so he keeps quiet.

The inmate doesn’t sing again. 

 

* * *

 

Shiro’s dragged out of his cell by sentries what constitutes as a week later, at a guess, and taken down to the gladiator pits. Their guns dig into the small of his back and the nape of his neck. It’s only the second time he’s been called down; last time he’d survived by the skin of his teeth, killing his opponent that many had said was undefeatable. That’s also the match he’d injured Matt Holt to take his place and save his life. He hopes that Matt and Sam Holt are alive and relatively safe wherever the Galra have taken them.

The ‘uniform’ of a prisoner differs from that of a gladiator only slightly; ‘prisoner uniform’ is black and ‘gladiator uniform’ is grey. The tight fit means there’s no restriction, allowing Shiro to move however he likes. Which also means that he can’t blame the suit if he gets injured or killed.

The walls and the ceiling shake under the fervour of the waiting Galra in the arena above stamping their feet against the floor, their bloodlust electrifying the air. Hairs on the back of Shiro’s neck stand on end, his heart beats faster until it aches. Adrenaline courses through his body, lighting every nerve in its path.

 _I could die here_ , he thinks. The thought entices him; there seems to be no way out of this hellhole. He could throw the match and die. If there’s any guaranteed method of escaping this hell, this is it.

He doesn’t realise he’s rooted himself to the spot until one of the guards shoves him roughly in the back and snarls, “Get moving.”

The arena is a dark, ominous purple. As Shiro walks out, his boots leave imprints on the dirt that’s stained from years’, perhaps decades’, worth of blood, _crunch crunch crunch_ the sound somehow still explosive in Shiro’s ears over the roar in his ears. He can’t see the Galra in the stands that circle around the pit itself, but he can feel them. Hear them. They’re chanting in their native tongue, rough and horrible, and Shiro’s hair stands on end. They want blood, they want death. If it’s Shiro’s, then so be it. What difference does it make to them?

Someone will die anyway.

Across the pit, a hulking figure emerges from the shadows. Muscles bulge in all four of his arms that are simultaneously longer and wider than Shiro’s entire body. Legs the size of tree trunks shake the ground like an earthquake with every step. As the figure moves into the light, he shows off his electric green skin twisted and warped with scars that give his skin the deceptive look of scrunched paper. His yellow teeth the size and shape of bricks, but there are gaps between a few of the teeth where they’ve been knocked out. Orange eyes glint in the dull light, eyes that are devoid of mercy, devoid of all emotion except bloodlust.

Shiro’s hands clench into fists by his sides. He feels sick. He feels a disconcerting mix of dizzy, faint, and determined.

A Galra approaches the wall separating the gladiator slaves from the crowd, then steps out onto a platform roughly a foot wide. In his hands, he carries two weapons; a long black scythe, and a black plasma rifle. If given a choice, Shiro would pick the rifle. Keeping his distance from the beast of an opponent will give him a greater chance of survival—

— _wait_ , says a little voice in the back of his head, _didn’t you say you wanted to die?_ —

“Begin!” shouts the Galra. He flings the weapons dead centre into the pits. Shiro takes off running as fast as he can, eyes on the rifle. If he can just get to it first—

The beast gets to it first. Shiro barely has time to stop in his tracks, switch directions toward the scythe, before the beast has the plasma rifle up and trained on him…

And _fires_.

**Author's Note:**

> [This is the song that Lance sings, called "Arrorró mi niño"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os4AdOvtHRA&list=LL-SWo5hIpOqCuPDutorcnAw&index=3&t=0s) and I think it's easy to see why he'd choose to sing this for comfort. Fun fact: The title of this song was actually going to be the title of the fic.


End file.
